August 9th, 2010

Ezra Klein has quite a few liberal/left journalistic credits to his name. He’s written for the Washington Post for over a year, for example. He was the founder, head honcho, and gatekeeper of the now-ill-fated listserve JournoList, controlling who among the hundreds of members would be in and who out. He was an associate editor at the American Prospect, and has been a columnist at Newsweek.

And just think, virtually all of these accomplishments occurred before Klein was 25 years old. In fact, he’s only twenty-six right now.

And the previous credentials of this wunderkind? Klein graduated from UCLA in 2005 with a degree in political science. He’d been a blogger as an undergrad, starting in 2003, and then moved his blog to the leftist American Prospect in December of 2007, close to a year after he’d begun JournoList (which occurred in February of 2007, at the venerable age of 23).

So my question is: how did this kid get such a great reputation and rise to a position of influence on the left and in MSM journalistic circles? I’m not just wondering because I disagree with his viewpoints. I’m wondering because I’ve noticed this trend towards extreme youth in journalism for quite some time, and consider it a very bad development.

It’s not that young people can’t write; they can. But their knowledge base is ordinarily composed of a roughly equal mix of youthful zeal, hubris, and ignorance, along with the book learning they’ve picked up in college. Except for some very rare cases (and I have no reason to believe that Klein is among them), their real-life experience—their hard-gained wisdom, you might say—is virtually nil.

Again, this is generally true on left or right. I’m picking on Klein because I only recently discovered his age, and it surprised me. It’s not really about Klein himself, either; he’s just an especially egregious and prominent example of the trend towards ever-younger journalists getting ever more influential positions, before they’ve had a chance to be seasoned by experience.

Why? I’m not sure whether this trend is mainly on the left, either, or whether it’s more generally true. But since the vast majority of journalists are liberals and/or leftists, the pool of young ones is certainly larger on that end.

I asked a good friend of mine who knows a bit about the business of reportage to tell me why so many journalists today seem to be youngsters, and he answered in two words, “They’re cheaper.” This claim is backed up in this piece, which describes it as a world-wide phenomenon:

It appears commercial pressures, falling wages and other factors are driving the age of journalists down in all parts of the world, at the expense of long-term collective memory, specialist knowledge and the wisdom that comes from experience.

The first reference came from a newspaper editor in Myanmar who noted that as his country heads toward its first election in 20 years, its newsrooms are populated with young journalists who don’t remember anything of the 1990 election and have no experience in political or electoral coverage. That lack of experience is worrying, he said…

The same thing is true here, unfortunately, although older journalists are hardly immune to the charges of ignorance and/or distortion of history. But younger ones have even more reason to be unaware of history, and less wisdom and experience to draw on in order to interpret it and relate it to events of the present.

Whatever happened to the idea of the cub reporter who must learn from his/her elders before being entrusted with the big stories? Gone the way of this:

[NOTE: This piece of Klein’s is typical, a pro-Obama pro-Democrat article purporting to use statistics to say that the recovery is going just fine, taking time but right on schedule. Note also the comments, almost all of which ridicule what he’s saying and point out his callow youth and ignorance—and remember, this is the Washington Post, not some conservative publication. The vast majority of the comments there are so pointed and so wickedly critical of Klein that I almost started to feel sorry for him—but I managed to stop myself in the nick of time.

I swear I had read neither the piece by Klein nor the comments section when I wrote my post above, although many of them expand on the theme I’ve sketched here. Here’s one, from commenter “jimmyjohns,” posted on 8/7/2010 at 8:10:23 PM:

why the HELL is ezra klein making these pronouncements from on high to all of us little nobodies among the masses? what has he done with his life aside from being a shill for “progressive” policies and citing highly dubious studies that promote his own policy preference (omg, no universal health insurance kills 50,000 people in the US each year… a liberal outfit that demands universal health insurance says so!)? why does the washington post subject us to this ridiculousness? the nyt is even more liberal than the post but at least they have people with some qualifications doing the shilling for the dems. and they usually cite them appropriately as being opinions/blogs and dont present them as nonpartisan news analyses.

This one, from “invention13” on 8/7/2010 at 7:10:29 PM is pretty fine, as well:

I would suggest that [Klein] get out more often, or at least turn on the local news. He would see loads of people losing their homes, who have been jobless so long all their benefits have run out. He would see that practically noone is hiring and that if corporate profits are up, it is simply because payrolls are down. All of our senses tell us “this is not a recovery”.
I’m not knocking him, this is the kind of thing young people say when they want to seem profound and get noticed. My suggestion to Ezra is that he put away the column for a few years, go out in the world and do something useful: start a business, learn a trade, etc.. and then come back when he has a bit more experience under his belt.

And the next one, by “MrRealistic,” is in the same vein:

Klein has no qualifications to write this article. The Post surely knows this but doesn’t care. They advocate a certain point of view and believe Klein is the perfect shill for them. The only way to get the Post’s attention it for everyone who thinks it’s an outrage that someone with no business experience is writing business columns should drop their Post subscription and explain why. Money talks and that is the only way the Post will care about the views of folks who don’t worship Obama.

Then there’s “TocquevilleDemocracy” on 8/7/2010 at 1:36:06 PM, who writes:

The Washington Post editors have jumped the shark allowing anything this ridiculous to be published by a Poli-Sci major 4 years out of UCLA, UNDERGRADUATE.

Having lived his 26 years knowing nothing but prosperity, we can forgive Klein for being so insensitive to the unemployed and so clueless on how they arrived there. What excuse can we make for the WaPo editors who hired this JournoLIST and keep publishing him anyway?

I could go on—and on and on and on—showing similar comments, but why bother? You get the idea.]

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57 Responses to “Ezra Klein: cub journalist”

About 20 years ago I happened to hear two young journalism majors lamenting the fact that they would probably have to work in a small town for a year or two, writing obituaries or covering school board meetings, before they got a job at a “real paper.” You would have thought they were being sent to Siberia! I guess nowadays even that easy apprenticeship has gone by the board.

I don’t expect anti-intellectualism such as in Canticle for Leibowitz. I figure there’ll be a reduction in the deference given to the Ivies and similar top-tier schools.
One reason to hire these guys is they don’t know how much they don’t know and, not needing to check on such things, complete their work faster.

For perspective, according to Bob Woodward’s Wiki profile, it was 1972 when he and Carl Bernstein started the investigation that led them to report about the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974. They would have been 29 and 28, respectively, in 1972.

Not materially different from Klein and the other members of the “juice box mafia” today.

Scott: while Ezra Klein is about the same age that Woodstein were, there is a difference in what they were discussing. Woodstein were doing investigative reporting: he said she said. Fact checking. Klein is making editorial comments on economics when he only has a Bachelor’s degree in political science. Capish?

It is not so much age as that Klein is claiming expertise in matters where he does not have any demonstrated expertise.

Klein is skilled at shilling for the Democrats, but not so good at any actual demonstrations of knowledge of economics.

When your country elects a president who has never run a business, never been in the military, never worked at crappy jobs while a student, knows no economics, and never had a real job, it’s not surprising that an empty suit can get a job at a newspaper.

The youth theme ties right in with Sebastian Haffner’s observations (Thanks again, David Foster) about the young Germans piling aboard the Nazi train. Not the ones who went through WWI as adults, not the ones who experienced the hyperinflation and Depression as mature adults.

I also just found out about Ezra Klein’s age, and now that I think about it, the Journolist totally sounds like something that an immature baby of a man would do – as in “I’m going to start a club that only my friends and people I like can join – no icky conservatives allowed!”

yup, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. I for one will be rooting for the anti-Ivy backlash. Bring it.

“So my question is: how did this kid get such a great reputation and rise to a position of influence on the left and in MSM journalistic circles? … I’m wondering because I’ve noticed this trend towards extreme youth in journalism for quite some time, and consider it a very bad development.”

But, you answer your own question, in general.

“It’s not that young people can’t write; they can. But their knowledge base is ordinarily composed of a roughly equal mix of youthful zeal, hubris, and ignorance, along with the book learning they’ve picked up in college. Except for some very rare cases (and I have no reason to believe that Klein is among them), their real-life experience—their hard-gained wisdom, you might say—is virtually nil.”

In the case of young master Klein, as with many of his MSM cohorts, who are exclusively left, it’s not so much that he knows what he’s talking about but that he parrots the correct narrative.

Sucking up to your bosses as a road to career advancement is nothing new.

First, full disclosure. As some of you may know, I have my graduate degrees from Harvard in chemistry. While there, I served my time as a graduate teaching assistant (aka coolie labor) in organic chemistry. So I had some first hand exposure to undergraduate, albeit not many humanities majors.

Generally speaking, they were intelligent, but callow youths. At that time, it was more or less expected that a student would work over summers if only to earn some pocket money. What was interesting was attitudes brought back in the Fall.

Some brought back a renewed commitment to work…they had seen hard work over the summer…and were expected to contribute their hard work. This was a positive experience: meeting The Real World. They would generally do better on average that the year before: work habits had improved.

The others were those whose daddies have given them “internships” at law firms or medical practices at firms run by friends or their own family practices. They were distinguished by no mental improvement or increase in work habit efficiency. The Privileges of The Self Appointed Elite was very real.

These two groups did not mix. Or socialize together. The grad students got along fine with the first group…we did our duty by the second and that was it.

I suspect that Group Two has grown in numbers, especially with the presence of an enhanced preference for offspring of alums. This is the student analogy of faculty tenure (and is equally poisonous).

At the end of the year at final grades, Professor Fieser would tell us: “Any student here who does not deserve to enter medical school? Now’s your chance…flunk ’em”.

And so we did…mostly those in Group two I might add.

That’s the way it was…in the Good Old Days. I think that the Group Twos have alienated the country to the point that they will bring down the full wrath on themselves – Super McCarthyism. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving Group.

But I’m afraid that Group One types will suffer more than the twits. That’s the tragedy…

If Klein is so ignorant about economics, how did he know to go to the “St. Louis Federal Reserve”, and how did he know what to look for there, and how did he know how to interpret it? How did he know to read “This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly”, and how was he able to understand it and verify its correctness? How was he smart enough to find and interview Joseph Kasputys, someone I’ve never heard of but, in retrospect, just the right person to go to? How was he smart enough to realize that the real problem is that the Republicans won’t allow more stimulus, not at all an obvious conclusion? The man’s a genius.

“So my question is: how did this kid get such a great reputation and rise to a position of influence on the left and in MSM journalistic circles?

C’mon, neo, you know how. It’s the same way that Buraq inter alia became editor of the law review. Those with the right …er, make that, “left” views get a tailwind from the Party. You’ve read Witness; don’t you see the pattern?

Charlie, I had similar experiences. My favorite was the rather dullish undergraduate who told me he didn’t want to go into research; he wanted to go into science policy, so he could tell people like me (i.e., dumb asses) what we should be working on.

I also had students occasionally call me up – at home – to help them with their homework. You know, just like at Andover (apparently). The faculty (especially junior faculty) were but hired help, the intellectual equivalent of native gun bearers, there to serve our betters.

LTEC/Ezra, you do realize that Krugman was a member of SociaList, right? Do you think Uncle Paul might have hooked up young Ulyanov with a few leads and/or talking points?

And as for the utility/desirability of more stimulus, that is very much a matter of opinion. The first honking great stimulus, which we could not afford, has produced…bupkis. One might profitably reflect on that fact before suggesting another hair of the dog.

I agree with Neo’s friend that part of Klein’s rise is because kids are cheaper.

Another part IMHO is the leftover attitude from the Internet Bubble that the rules of the game have changed so radically that experience is an impediment. Remember the anecdotes about how people who pointed out that tech stocks were insanely overvalued (if profitable at all) were dismissed–sometimes literally–with “You don’t get it.”? The MSM is endangered by the Internet, so they presumably are trying to hire people who “get it”.

Finally, leftist elitist MSM hiring manager, since you are well disposed to redesigning society “correctly”, you should hire & promote people whose thinking is “pure”.

If Klein is so ignorant about economics, how did he know to go to the “St. Louis Federal Reserve”, and how did he know what to look for there, and how did he know how to interpret it?

I am not an economist, and I have known for a while that the St. Louis Federal Reserve is a treasure trove of economics data. I don’t see you asking me for economics advice.

How was he smart enough to realize that the real problem is that the Republicans won’t allow more stimulus, not at all an obvious conclusion? The man’s a genius.

“The Republicans won’t allow more stimulus.” Who controls both houses? Last I heard, it was the Democrats. They can pass anything they want, regardless of what Republicans want.

Recall what the Obama Administration predicted about unemployment rates resulting from passing or not passing the Stimulus last year : by Summer 2009, it predicted ~ 7.5% unemployment if the Stimulus were passed, and ~ 9% unemployment if the Stimulus were not passed. Currently unemployment is around 9.5%. The Stimulus didn’t work the first time, given the predictions the Obama Administration gave us last year.

Given those predictions and current reality, only a fool or a Democrat would believe that another Stimulus would work. Sounds like someone who needed just one more hit. This hit of coke will do it just fine this time. Just need a little more. Bring it on, Ezra!

He’s written for the Washington Post for over a year, for example. He was the founder, head honcho, and gatekeeper of the now-ill-fated listserve JournoList, controlling who among the hundreds of members would be in and who out. He was an associate editor at the American Prospect, and has been a columnist at Newsweek.

So, in all, a pretty checkered career. But he may yet redeem himself, although I doubt it.

Let me think. If I remember right when the oil spill first happened Ezra was the guy putting out the talking points for the admin about how smart they were. You know, pointing out how the people at BP were laughing at Stephen Chen because they thought some gamma imaging he worked on in grad school was a waste of time. (They tried it and it worked.) The funny thing Ezra didn’t talk about was is the data they got from that technique in any way useful. (Since it doesn’t matter if the technique works, what matters if it gives them new useful data in a way they couldn’t get it before. For all we know the technique may have worked but was a complete waste of time and money.) Of course few now think Barry and Stevie look smart when it comes to the BP oil spill.

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Interesting comment about students who’ve worked v. those who haven’t, and the change a summer job can make, come the fall. I remember when I was an adjunct geologist teaching at a near-by state university. It was interesting to note that my best students were invariably those who were so-called non-traditional students, who had returned to school after a few years in the private sector, working or raising families. I’ve always thought it was because they were the ones with a real grasp on what an education could actually do for them. They never resented being asked actually to, you know, learn something, to work at it. They were the ones who had a serious grasp of signing up for a class as contract between instructor and student–I taught them what I already knew, and they were contractually obliged to learn it as well as they could.

We didn’t engage in any of this stupid, “The best classrooms are those where the teacher and the student learn together,” ed-school pap. I wouldn’t want to pay good money for a class taught by someone who was planning to learn the material with me, and I don’t know why anyone else would, either. You can’t teach what you don’t know, and if I don’t already know it, I should go sit down.

We didn’t engage in any of this stupid, “The best classrooms are those where the teacher and the student learn together,” ed-school pap

Which is among the many idiocies promulgated by the ed school fools. Except that for the ed schools, it tends to be the idiot fad of the year or decade, as they keep trying to reinvent the pedagogical wheel, ignoring the fact that there is a track record of some 2,500 years of formal classroom instruction to use regarding what works and what doesn’t.

Some students are well motivated from the beginning. I was not. I needed the time away from university to motivate me. “A university education will get me out of my dead-end jobs and put me where I want to go” is a much better motivator than “well what will I do” view I had at the beginning of my university career.

It is the same for the teaching profession. Especially in the high schools. My daughters were lucky to have men and women who were seasoned by age and experience, but my youngest is entering high school where her teachers are not much older than she, and they have the same way of speaking as their protégés. This doesn’t inspire confidence in me, but worse, it doesn’t inspire respect from the students.

Low wages at MSM outlets may explain not only the youth of the reporters working there, but also their political organization. That is, since the money is not great, what other motivation is there for entering the field? Quite simply, the busybody drive to tell other people what to think.

I can recall both as a student and an instructor that college classrooms used to have a generous sprinkling of military veterans. Many of the Army and Air Force guys had been to Europe, and many Navy guys had been to the Far East or the Mediterranean. Marines had been all over the globe.

Those were the days of the draft and the years closely following. The maturity difference between a 22 year old vet and an 18 year old kid out of high school was great.

With the exceptions of some junior colleges and commuter schools veterans are now rare on either side of the lectern. Young recent graduates have very little valuable life experience. Veterans have learned that the world does not revolve around their needs. They have been exposed to the vagaries of bureaucracy. They have learned to hurry up and wait. And as an Air Force colleague and veteran of bombing raids over Germany in WWII told me, “In a big operation you have to expect losses.”

Somewhat related to this shift is the lack of any military experience among recent candidates for political office. It’s gotten to the point that people just make it up.

I thought about commenting here two days ago when I first saw this post, but wasn’t sure what to add except my own sense of dismay that this young fellow with no real knowledge of anything except leftist tracts, leftist theory, and leftist tactics would be considered a wise or seasoned person by anyone with any sense or experience.

Then last night I got a call from a college friend who is in his early 40s and lives in New York City. At one point in the call, we were talking about the training of physicians, and he mentioned that he had been to a lecture by Ezra Klein a few weeks back, where Klein had been talking about something or other having to do with health care. Fortunately the sound of eye-rolling is not audible over the telephone. While I continue to be dismayed that almost everyone I know or have kept in touch with from college is now pretty firmly entrenched on the left, I can’t believe that many of them actually regard this fellow Klein as some sort of a sage worth listening to, especially given his young age and his lack of experience with anything other than spouting off lefty talking points.

……..Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence……………..

The tens of thousands of new voters Obama brought to the polls tonight came because he wrapped them in that experience, because he let them touch politics as it could be, rather than merely as it is. And for that, he deserved to win. And he deserves our thanks. The politician who gets the most votes merits our congratulations. But the politician who enlarges our politics and empowers more Americans to step forward into the public square deserves our gratitude. And we, in turn, deserve to permit ourselves to feel inspired, if only for a night.

Elsewhere in the news:
… it doesn’t hurt that Obama, tall and handsome and blessed with a weighty baritone, knows how to bring along a crowd while seeming to stay slightly above it. It also doesn’t hurt that he is married to Michelle Obama, a dynamic, ambitious Princeton and Harvard Law grad who is her husband’s intellectual equal, and often a better pitch-person than the candidate himself. On the stump, she is direct and sometimes takes up subjects Obama avoids …

Scary when you think of guys who could write something like that running around loose.

I wonder how he would take to 4 years in the marines? His sense of reality already seems pretty numb, would he write something like that about his drill sergeant? Would he try to organize a conscious raising session with the Taliban? He seems experienced at tweaking reality, or maybe he is living in an alternate universe, one we cannot perceive because of our limited understanding?
Or perhaps he is planning to take over from Gibbs as White House spokesman? I’ll go with alternate universe.

Here is what an adult can write, it’s by Faoud Ajami
“It is in the nature of charisma that it rises out of thin air, out of need and distress, and then dissipates when the magic fails. The country has had its fill with a scapegoating that knows no end from a president who had vowed to break with recriminations and partisanship. The magic of 2008 can’t be recreated, and good riddance to it. Slowly, the nation has recovered its poise. There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.”

I just got here Googling for how Ezra Klein got his job. I really have no clue. It’s hard to understand how he’s gotten a following. Like most liberals, I appreciate an honest discourse and Ezra certainly doesn’t provide that. He’s good at creating misleading charts, though, gotta give him that. I think he’s a disservice to liberals much like Rush is a disservice to conservatives.

The first comment jogged a memory of a article from the Washington Post Style Section published about 20 years ago. It tracked a retired editor who moved back to his small home town and bought the local paper. He liked to hire recent journalism grads who weren’t good enough to get a job offer from a “real paper”. He always made them drama critic and had them review the community theatre plays. They always hated the amateur productions and would review them accordingly. The editor liked to watch the fun when the townspeople dropped by to respond to the scathing reviews in person. The editor said that these kids need to learn that people are hurt by what appears in the paper.

Thanks, I’ve been looking for information about this subject for ages and yours is the greatest I’ve discovered so far.

About Me

Previously a lifelong Democrat, born in New York and living in New England, surrounded by liberals on all sides, I've found myself slowly but surely leaving the fold and becoming that dread thing: a neocon. Read More >>